Joe Biden

by Beatrice Gormley

  At school, the most unnerving times were when Joey had to recite or read aloud. He prepared himself for this even more intensely. Luckily for him, the students were seated in rows alphabetically by last name. Since young Biden was always in the first row, he could figure out which passages in the textbook he might have to read aloud. He memorized these passages and practiced a rhythm of speaking that avoided tripping up his tongue.

  One day Joey had prepared himself to read, “Sir Walter Raleigh was a gentleman. He took off his cloak and laid it over the mud so the lady would not dirty her shoes.” Sure enough, the teacher called on him to read that passage.

  Joey started off confidently, but then the teacher interrupted him in the middle of the first sentence, throwing him off his stride. She asked him to repeat one of the words. Joey started again, but his rhythm was broken. He began to stutter.

  The teacher imitated his speech: “Mr. Bu-Bu-Bu-Bu-Biden…”

  Joey couldn’t believe it. Up until now, his teachers had tried to help him overcome his stutter. But this nun was actually making fun of his disability. In front of the whole class.

  “I could feel a white heat come up through my legs and the back of my neck,” Joe Biden wrote years later. “It was pure rage. I got up from my desk and walked out of the classroom, right past the nun.” He stalked out of the school and kept walking for two miles, all the way home.

  Saint Helena’s telephoned Jean Biden to let her know that Joey had left the school, but not why. So Joey’s mother was waiting for him, shocked and angry—at her son. After ordering Joey into the car along with his littlest brother, Frankie, she drove back toward the school. “Joey,” she asked grimly, “what happened?”

  “Mom, she made fun of me,” he answered. “She called me ‘Mr. Bu-Bu-Bu-Bu-Biden.’ ”

  Jean Biden deeply respected the Catholic Church and its nuns and priests, and she brought her children up to have the same respect. But this day she marched into the school, sat Joey down outside the principal’s office with toddler Frankie on his lap, marched into the office, and demanded to see Joey’s teacher.

  The teacher, dressed in her usual nun’s habit and bonnet, was called to the office. At first, she tried to deny that she’d said anything out of line. But Joey’s mother insisted on a straight answer: Had she mocked Joey’s stutter?

  “Yes, Mrs. Biden,” said the nun defensively. “I was making a point.”

  At that, Joe Biden wrote later, “I could see my mother pull herself up to her full height, five foot one.” Jean Biden stepped up to the nun and said, “If you ever speak to my son like that again, I’ll come back and rip that bonnet off your head. Do you understand me?”

  * * *

  Although Wilmington was several hours’ drive from the Bidens’ old home in Scranton, the distance didn’t keep them away from Grandpop Finnegan’s house in Green Ridge. Joe and Jean Biden, with Joey, Valerie, Jimmy, and eventually baby Frankie, drove up to Scranton for Thanksgiving, for Christmas, for birthdays, for summer vacations. Joey’s old neighborhood pals saw him so often that some of them didn’t realize he’d moved away.

  And the boys would still go off together for the same kinds of fun. One summer Sunday in Scranton, when Joey and Charlie, Tommy, and Larry were twelve or thirteen, the boys started a water balloon fight. They were up on a ledge, with the road down below.

  Spotting a young man driving by in an open convertible, his arm around his girlfriend, Joey shouted, “Let ’em have it!” The first balloon hit the hood of the car. The second one landed right in the front seat, next to the girl.

  The driver jumped out of the car, wet and furious, and took off after the boys. “This guy would not give up,” said Larry Orr years later. The driver chased them all the way to the next town, Dunmore. The boys managed to shake him, finally, by hiding behind tombstones in a cemetery.

  * * *

  One of the first and most lasting values Joey learned, growing up, was family loyalty. He was supposed to watch out for his sister and brothers, and they were supposed to watch out for him. “You’re closer to one another than you are to your dad and me,” his mother told them. In a tough choice, family came first.

  A tough choice for Joey came when he had the job of keeping order on the school bus. Joey was proud of being chosen for safety patrol, and of wearing his blue badge. But one day it was Val, as he called his sister, who misbehaved on the bus. He was supposed to report kids who misbehaved—but turn in his own sister? Joey asked his father what he should do.

  “She’s your sister, Joey.”

  Joey understood. To be loyal to his sister, he couldn’t report her. But if he couldn’t do his job on safety patrol, he would have to resign. The next day, he gave up his blue badge.

  By the time Joey was in the eighth grade, he was well aware that his family’s money was tight. If he wore a hole in the bottom of his shoe, he might have to put a piece of cardboard inside until his father’s next payday. When he was invited to a dance, he had to scrape together an outfit from his father’s clothes.

  Joseph Biden’s dress shirt was much too big for Joey, so his mother turned the cuffs back and fastened them like French cuffs. Only, she couldn’t find his father’s cuff links. When she came back with nuts and bolts instead, Joey was horrified. “I am not going to wear this. The kids will make fun of me.”

  Calmly fastening the cuffs with the hardware, Jean Biden told her son, “If anybody says anything to you about these nuts and bolts, you just look them right in the eye and say, ‘Don’t you have a pair of these?’ ”

  At the dance, it turned out that Joey was right. While he was pouring himself a drink at the punch bowl, a boy grabbed his arm and exclaimed, “Look at Biden! Nuts and bolts!”

  But Jean Biden was right too. Heeding her advice, Joey stared at the other boy. “Don’t you have a pair of these?”

  The confidence in Joey’s voice must have shaken the other boy. There was a silence, while the group waited to see what he would answer. Finally he seemed to decide that nuts-and-bolts cuff links must be the latest fad. “Yeah,” he said. “I got a pair of these.”

  * * *

  As Joe progressed through the seventh and eighth grades at Saint Helena’s, he fixed his sights more than ever on Archmere Academy. But the tuition at Archmere was $300 a year. His father tried to get Joe to consider a less expensive Catholic high school, or even the public high school.

  Joe understood that his family couldn’t afford to pay the tuition, but that didn’t change his determination to go to Archmere. There had to be another way. After passing the Archmere entrance examination, he applied for a work-study program. Joe would do work for the school, and in exchange, his tuition fees would be waived.

  So the summer before his freshman year of high school, Joe worked on the Archmere grounds crew. Every day, from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon, he was one of a crew of about ten. The groundskeeper was a hoarse-voiced, bad-tempered fellow named Dominic, always growling complaints about the headmaster, Father Justin Diny.

  First Joe spent days weeding the formal gardens around the Archmere mansion. Next, he washed every window in the mansion itself, swabbing the glass with a rag soaked in vinegar and water, and drying it with newspaper. And then he painted the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the estate.

  Tactfully, Archmere didn’t embarrass the work-study boys by making them work during the school year. That first morning in September, Joe dressed in the school uniform of jacket and tie, and packed his new fountain pen, pencils, and notebooks. The school bus carried him between the stone pillars at the entrance, where he noted the fresh black paint on the wrought-iron gates. Up at the mansion, he silently admired the gleaming windows.

  Just inside the mansion was a foyer with marble pillars and a retractable stained-glass ceiling. Joe Biden, now a student at Archmere Academy, belonged in this magnificent place. With determination and a lot of hard work, he had made this dream come true.

  “Ask What You C
an Do for Your Country”

  Joe Biden was thrilled to be attending Archmere. But he still wished he weren’t so short. At age fourteen, he was five foot one and barely weighed one hundred pounds. Only one boy in his class was smaller.

  Worse, Joe’s stutter was more of a problem for him than ever. Archmere, a college preparatory school, expected its students to learn public speaking. It was one thing to memorize a paragraph to read aloud, as Joe had at Saint Helena’s. It was quite another to stand in front of 250 boys and deliver a five-minute speech. But that was a requirement at Archmere—every student had to take a turn giving a presentation at morning assembly.

  Because of his stutter, Joe was excused from the speech requirement the first year. This made life easier for him in a way, but he knew that his fellow students all understood why he was the only boy to be excused. And these college prep boys were less kind and more competitive than his friends in grade school.

  They nicknamed him “Joe Impedimenta,” using a word they’d learned in Latin class. They also called him “Dash,” meaning that he spoke like Morse code, dot-dot-dash. “They looked at me like I was stupid,” Joe Biden wrote later.

  The teasing shamed Joe and filled him with rage. And he realized what a threat the stutter was to his ambitions. He intended to do great things with his life, but the stutter loomed as an impediment, a roadblock, on the way to achieving his aims.

  Just look at Uncle Boo-Boo, who’d come from Scranton to live with the Bidens in Wilmington. Edward Blewitt Finnegan was a smart man, a college graduate who’d wanted to become a doctor. But because of his stutter, he was selling mattresses for a living.

  As much as Joe loved Uncle Boo-Boo, he was afraid of ending up like him. Life had dealt both of them an unfair blow, saddling them with a stutter. But as Joseph Biden advised his children, “If you get knocked down, get up.”

  So Joe worked hard at overcoming his impediment. He memorized long passages and practiced speaking in front of his bedroom mirror. Watching closely, he tried to keep his jaw muscles from clenching. If he saw his face tightening up, he’d pause, smile, try to relax his facial muscles, and then go on.

  Joe was willing to try anything that might help him conquer his stutter. He’d heard the story of Demosthenes, a famous orator of ancient Greece. Demosthenes, too, had grown up with a bad stutter. He’d conquered it by practicing speeches on the seashore, with pebbles in his mouth.

  Mayfield wasn’t near the ocean and its pebbles, but a neighbor of the Bidens happened to have a pebbled path. Helping himself to a handful, Joe put them in his mouth and tried to project his voice off a brick wall. “I nearly swallowed half the pebbles,” he wrote later. And it didn’t help his stutter.

  In spite of his struggles, or maybe because of them, Archmere was the right place for Joe Biden. In his first two years, he grew a whole foot. He’d been a fierce athlete even when he was short, but with his new size he became one of the best players on the football team, the Archers. He was fast, and he was amazingly good at catching a football. His team members gave him a new and much better nickname, “Hands,” for his skill at catching passes.

  Joe also had something maybe even more valuable than size or skill: a winning attitude. “He always had confidence, or made everybody believe he had confidence,” said his teammate Tom Lewis. “He’d never shy from a confrontation.”

  Joe continued to work on his stutter, encouraged by his teachers and especially by his mother, his biggest booster. He also had the sympathy of Uncle Boo-Boo, who understood exactly how Joe felt. But Joe could see that his uncle used his stutter as a crutch, an excuse for never doing much with his life.

  When Joe was a sophomore at Archmere, he finally stood up in front of morning assembly and gave the required five-minute speech. “No excuses, no exemptions, just like everybody else,” he wrote proudly years afterward.

  * * *

  Now that his stutter was under control, Joe discovered that he liked to talk. In fact, he had a natural “gift of gab,” as the Irish expression goes. And he had a lot he wanted to talk about.

  Joe was earning Bs at Archmere and was learning a great deal, especially in politics and history. He could talk and talk about these subjects, so much that his classmates teased him.

  Joe’s interest in politics went back to the lively discussions around Grandpop Finnegan’s kitchen table in Scranton. And in the Biden household in Wilmington, Joe’s father expected his children to be informed about public affairs. At dinner table discussions, Joseph often brought up big topics: equality, justice, the horrors of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.

  Uncle Boo-Boo made Joe read the New York Times editorial page, and he argued politics with Joe and his friends. One time he drove Joe and Val to Washington, DC, to see the Capitol, where the United States Congress met. Joe’s uncle even introduced them to an actual US senator, Everett Dirksen of Illinois.

  In Joe’s last two years at Archmere, his social life blossomed. Outgoing and friendly, he was popular with girls, and now he didn’t have to worry about stuttering when he asked them out. He and his friends went to high school dances at the DuPont Country Club and met each other at the Charcoal Pit for hamburgers and jukebox music. His girlfriend at that time was Maureen Masterson, a few years younger than Joe. Maureen attended Ursuline Academy, a Catholic girls’ school, where Valerie Biden was her best friend.

  More than ever, Joe was a natural leader. Others were drawn to him by his confidence and his upbeat attitude. His leadership style was to make everyone feel included, especially those who might be left out. He’d notice a younger boy who was being teased and deliberately invite him to come along with Joe and his friends.

  * * *

  For Joe’s senior year at Archmere, 1960–61, the football team had a new coach, John Walsh. The Archmere Archers had been winning less than one game per year for the last twelve years. As Walsh put his new team through practice sessions, he chose Joe Biden and his teammate Mike Fay as halfbacks.

  The coach knew that Joe wanted very much to be team captain, but he tapped Mike instead. However, the coach was impressed with Joe’s reaction: he accepted the coach’s decision, and he didn’t sulk. He just kept on playing his best for the team.

  Shaped into a tightly bonded unit by Coach Walsh, the Archers began the season by winning their first game. Then they won their second game, and their third, and so on through the season. Halfback Joe Biden was the leading scorer. Whatever the situation on the field, he had a detailed idea of how he could make a touchdown. And his favorite four words were still, “Give me the ball.”

  Racial Segregation

  After Reconstruction ended in 1877, Southern states began to pass laws against racial integration. The mingling of Black people with white people—in schools, on trains and streetcars, in theaters, in restaurants, on beaches—was forbidden. In 1896 these laws were challenged in the courts. But the Supreme Court ruled that separating Black people and white people in public places was legal, as long as the accommodations for each race were equal. This ruling officially began the “Jim Crow” period, in which segregation was the law across the South.

  However, the “equal” part of the Supreme Court’s ruling was never enforced. The separate restrooms, drinking fountains, and especially the schools for Blacks were inferior or even nonexistent. In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled that separating Black children and white children in the public schools was unconstitutional, and therefore illegal.

  But many school systems, especially in the South, were very slow to begin desegregating. And the federal government, with Dwight D. Eisenhower as president, did not enforce the court’s ruling. Schools remained segregated, and so did public transportation. On buses, for instance, Black passengers were expected to sit in the back, in the “colored” section.

  In the North, there might not have been laws requiring segregation by race, but restaurants and hotels often refused to allow Black customers. Real-estate agents in many areas would not sell property or rent homes
to Blacks, and banks would not offer them mortgages. So Black people were forced to live only in certain neighborhoods, and their children went to schools only in those districts. The result was not only segregated housing but also segregated schools.

  During the early 1960s, racial segregation was the unwritten rule in Wilmington. Many white high school students were unaware of the racial barriers. But Joe noticed, and the unfairness bothered him. One time, as Mike Fay remembered later, the Archmere football team went to the Charcoal Pit as usual. Frank Hutchins, the only Black student at Archmere, was in the group.

  As the hungry team poured into the dining room, an employee stopped Frank. Frank couldn’t come in with the rest of the boys, he was told. If he wanted to buy a hamburger, he’d have to go to the take-out window.

  Seeing Frank shut out, Joe, Mike, and the rest of the football team all had the same reaction. Without discussing the problem, they got up and left the diner.

  * * *

  Joe was elected class president for both his junior and senior years at Archmere. Valerie, Joe’s second-biggest booster after their mother, handed out flyers for his campaigns. Joe would have run for student body president, but Father Diny, the headmaster, discouraged the idea. Joe had built up a number of demerits, and Father Diny pointed out that a leader ought to be a role model too.

  However, at Joe’s graduation from Archmere in June 1961, it was his charge as class president to give the class welcome. He stepped onto the stage in front of his classmates’ friends and families and performed this duty perfectly. “Without a single stammer,” he wrote later in his memoir.